Sunday Service

As a totem reflecting ‘love’, the contradiction of exclusionary practice embodied by the church often averts the desire to participate in doctrinal beliefs, when YOU signify what ‘they’ deem evil.

A continuation of a curatorial conversation held in 2010, Sunday Service seeks to destabilise the commercialization of Queerness. When in 2010 Blank Projects hosted the exhibition Swallow My Pride, the body of work criticised Gay Pride for its corporatised commodification of the gay experience, crafting pink-money that allows one to buy into the heteronormative capitalist hierarchy.

In its original statement, it read: “This constructed stereotype is not only conservative, inhibited and achingly dull; crucially it dismisses the real-life diversity of the gay community, where issues of race, poverty, religion, discrimination, and self-acceptance continue to be a daily struggle.”

It’s the loop of modernity where pockets of ‘post-gay’ lifestyles homogenize the impression of Queer, shifting our focus from the violent witch hunts against Queer bodies in Tanzania, the USA, Brazil, Chechnya, etc., to witchy drags posted on social media, flaunting abs and fairy wings.

Archaic ideologies become the stunt of modernity. Where notions of ethics, crippled by religious interpretations, feel themselves so threatened by the softness of Queer that their only response is to institutionalise further violent oppression on the Queer body.

Sunday Service opens the church doors in an attempt to radically queer space. And since queer is not a suggestive act but an exalted emancipation, our wish for this exhibition is to show Queer as that essence of omnipotent love. Sunday Service extols the divine beings reverenced by the beauty of trans and kneels to the energy of femme. We pay homage